Recently adopted net neutrality regulations soon could make your monthly Internet bill more complicated ”” and potentially more expensive.

Every month, consumers pay a small fee on their phone bills for a federal program that uses the money ”” a total of $8.8 billion raised nationwide last year ”” to provide affordable access to telecommunications services in rural areas, underserved inner cities and schools.

Now the fee could start appearing on broadband bills too, in a major expansion of the nearly two-decade-old Universal Service Fund program.Read it all.

In the eyes of most young people, the status quo has been tried and found wanting. Something far more worthwhile and exciting is needed.

The Prime Minister tried to offer a grander vision with the notion of the Big Society. It sounded promising, but seems to have petered out.

Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, bravely attempted to define British values, but little came of it.

Worthwhile values are not vague aspirations, but hard won and enduring moral and ethical principles which shape national policies and personal behaviour.

The truth which needs to be told, and of which politicians of all hues fight shy, is that the origin of the United Kingdom’s moral direction is grounded in the Bible.

Read it all.

RNS: Let’s get practical. Give me one thing”“only one”“that you think churches should do to promote and nurture your kind of friendship?

WH: I wish more churches would recognize that certain friends are, for gay Christians, our “significant others.” Right now, if you’re gay and celibate in a lot of conservative churches, you’re probably going to feel under suspicion”“or worse. If you sit with your best friend in church, if you go on vacation with your friend, or if you spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with her and her family, you may get raised eyebrows or else just blinking incomprehension. I’d like that to change.

I’d like to see close, committed, promise-sealed friendships become normalized in churches that continue to teach the historic, traditional Christian sexual ethic. What if we treated it as important, honorable, and godly for a celibate gay Christian to commit to a close friend precisely as a way of growing in Christian love? That would make a big difference in how we currently think about homosexuality.

Read it all.

The country’s divorce laws should be overhauled to remove the need for allegations of adultery and blame, Britain’s most senior woman judge has said.

Baroness Hale of Richmond said that she wanted to see the acrimony taken out of most matrimonial disputes with divorces granted without a person being held at fault.

At present the 120,000 couples who divorce in England and Wales each year have to cite one of five reasons: adultery; unreasonable behaviour; desertion for two or more years; two years’ separation with consent; or five years’ separation without consent.

Those who want to divorce quickly are encouraged to cite unfaithfulness or unreasonable behaviour, which encourages recriminations, critics argue.

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Liten to it all and you can read more about it, including finding the lyrics, at Lent and Beyond.

INTERVIEWER

You once said that you “proceed from the assumption that the distinctions available to us in this world are not arrayed between good and bad but between bad and worse.” Do you ever worry that you’re too pessimistic?

ROBINSON

I worry that I’m not pessimistic enough. My own life is full of profound satisfactions, and I’m distracted from the fact that the world is not in good shape. I cherish time, for instance, and for the most part I have control over my time, which is a marker of a very high standard of living as far as I’m am¨concerned. At some point I created an artificial tropic for myself, where I could do exactly what I wanted to do and be rewarded for it. There’s a puritanical hedonism in my existence.

INTERVIEWER

Puritanical hedonism?

ROBINSON

I read books like The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine. Oh, terrific.

Read it all (Hat tip: DM).

The Assyrian Chris­tians of northern Iraq are among the people who have been massacred and kidnapped by ISIS militants in recent months. Such accounts are depressingly familiar to anyone who knows the region’s history. In fact, this year marks a grim centennial. Besides be­ing the centennial of the Ar­menian Genocide, it’s the centennial of the year that the Ottoman Turkish regime struck at other Christian minorities whom it suspected of being sympathetic to Russia. The Assyrians call 1915 Sayfo, the Year of the Sword.

Assyrian Christians had very deep roots in the region, and their churches use a Semitic language related to Jesus’ own Aramaic. In late antiquity, believers divided over the Person of Christ. The Monophysite branch evolved to become the modern-day Syrian Orthodox Church. Their Nestorian rivals formed the Church of the East, which remained a flourishing trans­continental institution through the Middle Ages.

By the 20th century, the Assyrian community had declined, split between be­lievers affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church (Chal­deans) and the independent Assyri­ans. For historical convenience, the As­syr­ian label is often applied to all the Syriac-speaking denominations, in­cluding the Syrian Ortho­dox. Their combined population in 1914 was around 600,000, concentrated in what is now northern Iraq and the borderlands of modern-day Syria and Turkey.

These people were the targets of the Assyrian geno­cide.

Read it all.

Modern biological research continues to generate new technology at a staggering pace, bringing to society new challenges and new opportunities. A recent appearance is the so-called CRISPR/Cas9 technology for altering genes in the body’s cells, including, most troublingly, early embryonic cells.

To understand the challenge brought by this technology it is important to make a distinction between somatic cells and germ-line cells. Somatic cells are the run-of-the-mill cells of our bodies: muscles, nerves, skin and the like. Germ-line cells are the egg and sperm cells that, when joined, give rise to offspring. Making gene changes in somatic cells can have dramatic effects, but they are not transmitted to the next generation and therefore fall comfortably into the category of pure therapeutics and generate minimal controversy. It is changes in germ-line cells that create heritable alterations.

The advent of CRISPR/Cas9 again sees a biomedical technology challenging norms and raising concerns. CRISPR/Cas9 makes it comparatively easy to modify germ-line inheritance by inserting, deleting or altering bits of DNA. It may be possible to make these alterations quite precise, with no undesired changes in the genome. Nevertheless, such changes would be inherited not only by the next generation but by all subsequent generations.

Read it all.

Easter Spoken Word from Grace Chapel Teaching Team on Vimeo.

Watch and listen to it all carefully from Grace Church, Lexington, Massachusetts

O Almighty God, hear thy people who are met this day to celebrate the glorious resurrection of thy Son our Lord; and lead them on from this festival to eternal gladness, to the joys that have no end; through the same our Saviour Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.

There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

–1 Corinthians 15:41-50

Despite the images we’ve seen splashed across the web of Islamic State fighters driving around Syria and Iraq in American Humvees and waving U.S.-made weapons, there really isn’t all that much American military gear floating around out there.

But what equipment has been captured by the radical Islamists has the tendency to float upward toward the leadership who covet the “elite” U.S. gear, according to a group cataloging illicit arms transfers.

Speaking to a small April 7 gathering at the Stimson Center in Washington, Jonah Leff, director of operations for Conflict Armament Research said that American equipment actually “represents a small fraction” of the 40,000 pieces of gear his teams have cataloged in northern Iraq and Syria since last summer. He said that includes only about 30 U.S.-made M-16s and roughly 550 rounds American-produced ammunition.

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November 2014 marked the fifth anniversary of the promulgation of Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, which established personal ordinariates for Anglican converts to Roman Catholicism “so as to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift”¦and as a treasure to be shared.” Anglicanorum Coetibus was not greeted with universal applause among former Anglicans already in communion with Rome, at least not among those of my acquaintance. These converts, who had left Anglicanism for what they had come to believe was the true Church, and who had been attending ordinary Novus Ordo parishes, sometimes for decades, wondered what substantial patrimony Anglicans could bring into the Church. To be sure, Anglicans have (or used to have) splendid liturgies, and their church music was incomparable, at least into the middle decades of the past century. But what do Anglicans have to give to the Church that is not of common inheritance from the pre-Reformation centuries or simply Protestant heresy?

A number of writers has tried to answer this question by taking an inventory of the strong and attractive characteristics of the Anglican heritage ”” for example, the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible, theologians like Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, poets like John Donne and George Herbert, not to mention moderns like C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. This method is useful, if only because it sets us thinking about what Anglicanism really is; but it does not arrive at the essence of Anglicanism.

The answer lies instead in the origins of Anglicanism at the beginning of modernity….

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Someone once asked me if I thought the resurrection was necessary. He meant it in the most sincere way, as a person of both faith and doubt who wondered if we needed to be bound by so unreasonable a proposition that Jesus’ tomb was, in fact, empty on that first Easter morning.

I hesitated in answering, because there seemed to be layers of argument behind the question. My answer was yes, resurrection is the foundation of Christian faith, but probably not in the way he meant it.

To say that resurrection is essential doesn’t mean that if someone were to discover a tomb with Jesus’ remains in it that the entire enterprise would come crashing down. The truth is that we don’t know what happened to Jesus after his death, anymore than we can know what will happen to us. What we do know from the stories handed down is how Jesus’ followers experienced his resurrection. What we know is how we experience resurrection ourselves.

Read it all from 2013.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

As I am in the US for the first time in many years, I find myself longing for the simplicity of Maua, Kenya, during Easter time. There Easter has none of the commercial trappings we find here. As I enter grocery stores, discount stores, and department stores I am shocked at the amount of space taken by the Easter candy, bunnies and stuffed animals, baskets, decorations, and new spring clothing. These items take more space than any grocery store has for all their goods in Maua.

I recently read that an estimated $2 billion will be spent on Easter candy this year in the US. Two billion dollars to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who asked us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give water to the thirsty, house the homeless, care for the sick and imprisoned, and welcome the stranger.

Read it all.

Watch and listen to it all.

Listen to it all (starts about 1 minute in).

Read it all.

With thanks to Kevin Kallsen and George Conger at Anglican TV

In his Easter Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Archbishop Justin gave a ringing endorsement of the resurrection of Christ as central to our Gospel message. He spoke of the urgent, joyful and sometimes dangerous task of testifying to a relationship with the living Christ that has been given to all Christians. But why did he refer to “sexuality” and what did he mean by it?
“Witnesses are people who know Christ; lay or ordained, old or young, gender, politics, sexuality or whatever irrelevant”.
……..
What did the Archbishop mean when he said that “sexuality is irrelevant” to proclaiming the resurrection?
……..
In his closing remarks, the Archbishop says that “every disagreement in which love is maintained” witnesses to the living Christ. In other words, it is not just our proclamation of the resurrection, but the way in which we stay together, maintaining “good disagreement” even though we disagree over issues such as gender and politics and homosexuality, which testifies to Christ.

So here is the problem. By saying that “sexuality or whatever” is irrelevant to the witness of Christians to the resurrection, the Archbishop probably intends to say that the debates preoccupying the church are petty compared with the task of winning disciples to Christ through word and deed. Whatever he meant to say, he has run the risk of being misunderstood in two ways: suggesting that sexual morality is not important to Christian witness, and more specifically, that to be “gay” (by which most hearers would assume, sexually active) is completely compatible with authentic resurrection-based Christian Faith. Julian Mann in his recent piece reminds us that the opposite is true according to Romans 6:2-4: the resurrection of Christ was physical, and so not only speaks of his victory and his Lordship in a spiritual sense, but demands physical and moral change in obedience and faith from his disciples in response.

The Archbishop’s sermon is superb in its reminder that the empty tomb needs daily interpretation to the world by Christians in all their rich variety. But by using the word “sexuality” in its context, (which he did not need to do), he has at best run the risk of being misunderstood. At worst he has prejudged the outcome of his own ”˜Conversation’ process, and opposed the teaching of his own church, by suggesting the moral neutrality of homosexual practice.

Read it all.

The doctor, who has been practicing medicine for 34 years, needed specialist health help and advice. But being based in “the middle of the woods”, Armstrong’s closest endocrine specialist was over 300 miles away, he said.

That’s when Armstrong logged onto Sermo, a sort of “Facebook for doctors”. The service, which launched in 2005 in the U.S., allows members to sign up and chat to each other to find solutions. The company announced the U.K. launch on Wednesday allowing doctors from the U.K. to chat to their U.S. counterparts.

“There’s a lot of medical knowledge that when shared across borders will benefit the global healthcare system,” Sermo’s CEO Peter Kirk, told CNBC by phone.

Read it all.

Bill Musk spent the afternoon of (Western) Palm Sunday joining the Tunisian “March for Bardo” with some of our Arabic congregation members.

The atmosphere was relaxed but serious, as participants were deeply aware that the solidarity march came about because of the tragic events at the Bardo [National] Museum [in Tunis] on 18 March 2015, in which ISIS affiliates opened fire on museum visitors, killing twenty-one tourists and one policeman.

The event, led by Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi, included thousands of people and was joined by a number of dignitaries, including French president, Francois Hollande, Polish president, Bronislaw Komorowski; Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister; Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority; and Algeria’s prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal.. There were huge posters containing the photograph of two politicians murdered by extremists since the Tunisian Revolution.

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Oil-related job cuts may start to slow: Energy firms announced plans to lay off 1,279 workers in March, down from 16,000 in February. But for oil patch states, other questions remain: the health of the service economy surrounding energy firms, the reliability of tax revenues, and so on.

Some of that uncertainty may be trickling through to the broader economy. Some 42% of all IBD/TIPP respondents still say the U.S. is in a recession in April, nearly six years after the economic recovery began.

Yet recent data has been fitful, making it hard to get a clear read on whether the economy is turning down or just taking a beating from temporary factors ”” the oil price plunge, severe winter weather, and the West Coast ports labor slowdown, for example.

Read it all.

A few days ago he hinted he’ll be hanging up his Wolverine claws – now Hugh Jackman’s reported to be taking on the role of an apostle.

Deadline magazine says the actor will star in Apostle Paul, a film being developed by Warner Bros.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s company Pearl Street Films will produce it.

Apostle Paul, also known as St Paul, was a Jewish man who was a persecutor of Jesus’ followers before becoming a teacher of Christianity.

Read it all.

A pastor’s daughter has been killed in an arson attack on a church and manse in Kano state in north-western Nigeria.

The Baptist Church at the village of Gidan Maso was attacked by arsonists whose aim was to murder a young man who converted back to Christianity after embracing Islam.

The pastor, Rev Habila Garba, lost his daughter to suffocation when the two young men set fire to his home as well as to the church.

Read it all.

A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder Tuesday after shooting and killing a black man following a routine traffic stop over the weekend.

The decision to charge the officer, Michael Thomas Slager, came after graphic video footage emerged depicting Slager firing a volley of bullets into the back of Walter Scott, who was running away.

Officers rarely face criminal charges after shooting people, a fact that has played into nationwide protests over the past year over how the police use deadly force. Yet this case took a swift, unusual turn after a video shot by a bystander provided authorities with a decisive narrative that differed from Slager’s account.

Read it all from the Washington Post and the local paper here.

Living Spirit Ministry in Swissvale chose to inaugurate its newest worship space today, when most churches celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“It was natural we would start a new endeavor on Easter Sunday,” said its pastor, the Rev. Dai Morgan.

To be sure, it’s a modest space ”” a new rented storefront in place of its previous one ”” and the small congregation’s finances are still as marginal as that of many members.

But the church has weathered many changes, so Rev. Morgan plans to preach on new beginnings. “I’m also going to go back to the basic theological point of view that our whole faith is based on the resurrection,” he said.

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O Lord God Almighty, whose blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ did on the third day rise triumphant over death: Raise us, we beseech thee, from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness, that we may seek those things which are above, where he sitteth on thy right hand in glory; and this we beg for the sake of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

–John 15:1-11

Islamist Boko Haram militants disguised as preachers killed at least 24 people and wounded several others in an attack near a mosque in northeast Nigeria’s Borno state, a military source and witness said on Monday.

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